Donaldson: Only the players learn anything meaningful at mini-camp

In case you haven’t noticed, football is played with pads on.

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Jim Donaldson
Posted Jun. 17, 2014 @ 12:30 pm

In case you haven’t noticed, football is played with pads on.

And, since pads are prohibited in mini-camp by the terms of the NFL’s Collective Bargaining Agreement with the NFLPA, we’re not going to learn anything meaningful about the prospects of the Patriots in 2014 from what goes on at mini-camp this week in Foxboro.

As Bill Belichick pointed out at his press conference Tuesday morning in his first meeting with his good friends in the media since the draft.

“There are a lot of things that we’re going to need to do when we get to pads, particularly in the running game,” Belichick said.

In the meantime, what he hopes to do this week, as he has been doing in the, ahem, Organized Team Activities — I love that phrase — of recent weeks, is indoctrinate the newcomers and refresh the memories of veterans regarding the Patriot Way of doing things.

“Well, this is the official mini-camp,” said Belichick, “but really it’s just a continuation of what we’ve been doing for the last 10 practices over the past three weeks. So, we’re just trying to keep moving ahead here, installing some of our plays, trying to get everybody on the same page.

“Obviously, we’ve made some adjustments and changes from what we were doing last year. We’ll try to keep building on that and try to put ourselves in as good a position as we can to be ready to go at training camp.”

That’s when the Pats will put on the pads. That’s when they’ll start hitting. That’s when they’ll begin to go at each other full speed. That’s when the competition for roster spots truly begins. That’s when we’ll start to have an idea of just how good the Patriots can be in the coming season.

“We haven’t really done anything on the field,” Belichick said Tuesday morning. “We’ve taught a lot. I think, hopefully, we’ve learned a lot. But we haven’t had the competition that we’re going to have in training camp. It’s just not the same.

“On top of that, we have a lot of guys who, even though they may know what to do, they haven’t had much experience doing it. Hopefully, by the time we get to training camp, we’ll be in a little different position, where the players will have a little bit better understanding (of) what to do.

“They will have done it at least in a controlled setting. Then we’ll we’ll see, based on the competition, how they’re actually able to do it against somebody else who is competing at that same level. That’s when we’ll really see that. We’re not really going to see that now.”

For now, then, it’s the players who are learning.

The rest of us won’t learn much of anything about the players ’til they put on the pads next month at training camp.